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Sunday, December 07, 2008

Fiscal 'Common Sense' Brought Balance To Budget


Journal Staff Report
          Sen. Pete Domenici first rose to national prominence in the early 1980s as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and, in 1997, Congress approved the first balanced budget in more than three decades.
        It was a historic achievement under Domenici's leadership, soon undone by a freer-spending Congress.
        Former Senate Budget Committee staff director G. William Hoagland, in an address to the Domenici Legacy Conference at New Mexico State University in August, compared Domenici's budget efforts to the Myth of Sisyphus — the story of a mortal condemned by the gods to roll a huge boulder up the side of a mountain, only to have it roll back down again.
        But the 1997 effort established what Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., and others call the modern budget process in Congress.
        Hoagland, in a recent conversation, defined the guiding light of Domenici's efforts over those years of trying to balancing the federal budget as his "fundamental common sense."
        "He was raised in a conservative environment," Hoagland said. "You didn't spend more than you took in. I think the concept of accumulating debt and burdening future generations haunted him."
        In his speech to the legacy conference, Hoagland said, "Through the struggles, Senator Domenici remained solid in his beliefs. Like a family, a business, a university, or a state, he recognized that the federal government can not long sustain an imbalance in what it takes in and what it spends.
        "Finding that balance has required dedication, hard work, diligence, pragmatism, perseverance and maybe above all else, bipartisanship," Hoagland said.
        Domenici described hammering out the agreement over a period of several weeks in his small "hideaway," or secondary office in U.S. Capitol. Aides hustled in and out, day and night, carrying ledger sheets and agency budget requests.
        "There should be a sign on the door saying, 'the balanced budget was negotiated in this room,'" Domenici said. "Newt Gingrich was the point man on the House side. It was the biggest instrument of (fiscal) change that we'd ever had. Of course, members set a lot of it aside two years later when it started pinching (their budget requests)."
        Domenici said President-elect Barack Obama might want to dust off the mechanisms that he and then-President Clinton used, at least temporarily, to balance the federal budget.
        "I believe the model we set might be the one they can use," Domenici said.